Dungeness Crab
Melanie
November 29, 2010
Here in CA everyone knows this time of year is crab season. Dungeness Crab season. There’s usually a ton of it in the stores by now, but this season there was a slow start, so we haven’t had that much. One thing I do know though is cooking crab is only half the battle. Clean, cook, clean then eat. It’s the cleaning of the crab, the getting to the meat of the crab that can turn anyone off the tasty meal in a flash.
Have no fear though! I’ll take you on a Crab cleaning tour so you won’t be to shy of doing it yourself!
First get a crab,
Bad Mr. Crab!
After it’s cooked which this one is already,(Boil a live Dungeness for 15-18 minutes in salty water) You’ll flip it over and take the legs off. That’s the easy part. You’ll just have to crack the legs open to get the meat.
Now you have something that looks like this. Yeah it’s not the prettiest,
You want to grab the shell under and remove it from the body
Now it’s time to pop the top!
Give it a good rinse so you can see what your looking at.
These are the gills, you do not want to eat them. So take these off and rinse the center out well.
Now you should have a cleaned crab that looks something like this. You now need to break it in half and start pulling meat out.
That’s all really good meat, you just have to dig it on out. I didn’t get a good picture of the meat after it was pulled as it’s so time consuming and well, four kids, starving, begging for food *sigh*
Leg meat on the right, and the rest on the left.
We were so hungry by the time we got all the meat out I didn’t even pull the garlic butter out to use, we ate it plain and it was just as yummy! Though really, try some melted butter, if you like garlic make it garlic butter and have at it!
Enjoy!
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Chip
Yummmmmm, looks so tasty!!